


Boys Only Want Love If It's Torture

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Comedy, Happy Ending, Infidelity, Jealous Avon, Jealousy, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Post Gauda Prime, President Blake, Troll Vila
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 06:46:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6791839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having circumnavigated the Gauda Prime blow-out, Avon has a lot of pent-up crazy regarding Blake just waiting to be released. Vila has an idea for a hilarious practical joke straight out of Shakespeare's playbook. President Blake has a clear conscience and, as a result of the previous two statements, no furniture whatever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boys Only Want Love If It's Torture

**Author's Note:**

> beta'd by Elviaprose
> 
> Well, I think the title is fucking hilarious.

Blake and Avon ran into one another totally by accident, respectively freeing slaves and being sold as one. In the resulting chaos, they managed to shoot Servalan, shut down the slaving ring, and get off the planet alive with their respective teams (plus one kindly old man) and Servalan’s body: a key exhibit in some plan of Blake’s to embarrass and possibly unseat the current Federation government.

“You know, technically,” Blake said to Avon (a smile creeping across his face, as though he were trying to suppress it), “I own you now.”

Avon thought about contesting that. About pointing out that Blake was the least likely person in the universe to go in for owning and operating human chattel. About snapping ‘so what’s new?’

Instead, because they were alone in a corridor of Blake’s ship, and because Avon had been looking for an opening, he said, quite dryly, “do you really? I suspect I was being sold into sex slavery—though even I must admit it is hardly the most efficient disposition of me as a resource.” Avon grinned, sudden and savage. “Well, Blake? Do you intend to put me to the use advertised?”

Blake opened his mouth, and the look on his face said he was going to apologize for being insensitive about Avon’s brush with a fate worse than death.

“Because I,” Avon said, heading off that business before Blake worked himself into a proper guilt trip, “wouldn’t mind at all.”

Blake blinked at him. “Are you really _Avon?_ ” He demanded suddenly.

Avon raised an eyebrow and waited for an explanation.

“Avon,” Blake clarified, “who wouldn’t bluntly proposition a whore in a whorehouse. Avon who distrusts everything and everyone, and never commits himself to a position if he can possibly help it. Avon, who danced around the entire subject of whether we were even interested in one another for two _bloody_ years—”

“Well now,” Avon smiled more thinly, thinking of the subsequent period he’d spent tormented by the idea that Blake might be dead—having realized, now that it was unavailable to him, that there was a position he wanted to take quite definitively. “And what did that ever get me?”

“You tell me,” Blake snorted, eyeing Avon warily, like he couldn’t _quite_ believe what was occurring: Avon alive, Avon here, Avon baldly offering to—well, possibly some role play had been implied, but Blake didn’t want to jump to conclusions (and told his brain and extremities as much, _very firmly_ ).

“All right,” Avon said calmly, shoving Blake backwards through the nearest door, into a conference room. “I will.”

“This is a work room,” Blake tried, “anyone could—”

Avon laser-welded the door shut with a probe he seemed to have picked up off his ship during the brief period he’d been on it before teleporting aboard. “You were saying?”

“We don’t even have any lubricant!” Blake protested.

“That,” Avon said, removing some items from his jacket’s interior pockets, “is where you are wrong.”

“Do you typically bring this sort of equipment to a negotiation?” Blake quipped, still reeling but also wondering what the hell Avon got up to these days. He’d used to go in for a kind of Ice Prince chastity. Now it was all—Blake couldn’t think of anything nice to say about those boots, so, as his mother had taught him, he wouldn’t say anything at all—and pocket-lubricant, and what the _hell_ was that in the wrapper?

“Just one with you,” Avon said crisply. “Incidentally, this seems as though it might be the time to bring up the fact that we are now in an exclusive arrangement.”

“I _missed you_ ,” Blake said thickly, _really_ meaning it.

Avon’s lip quirked. “Not yet, though I am told it happens to everyone. But I’ll hold quite still.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Blake said airily, getting Avon out of his jacket and control over the situation again. “I can do it for you.”

And he did hold Avon quite still, for the first round of the proceedings at least, informing Avon (when Avon encouraged him, indicating that no, he really _did_ want that) that he was the best purchase he’d ever made. Blake wryly pointed out, circa round three, that this might have been better with a bed. In turn, Avon pointed out that they weren’t _that_ old yet, and that Blake’s bed (provided Blake had been left to his own devices) was probably about as comfortable as this conference table. Avon did not point out that even waiting as long as they had done had been tantamount to torture (and that given his experiences in Blake’s absence, he’d know).

At some point Blake said something about loving him, and Avon said good, that would make things easier. Blake, in too wonderful a mood to take that as a slight, just laughed, and tried to think of a really good excuse to give his people about what had happened to the door.

***

Killing Servalan took all the direction out of the rim-world Pylene campaigns. Her tendency to hoard information and to trust no one sufficiently to meaningfully delegate to them had been assets to her in her lifetime. They also presented a tremendous problem for the Federation after her death. She had never truly cared about the government beyond the prospects it offered her for her own advancement, and thus she had not ensured that her plans would be carried out smoothly in the event of her demise. True, the organization had made her, but Servalan was an ungrateful child.

Broadcasting verifiable information about Servalan’s illegal activities, cover-identity and death had caused the weak team of people currently technically in charge of the Federation to lunge at one another’s throats, looking to find out who’d allowed for and concealed the survival of this massive internal threat with her own agenda, who’d _screwed_ them on this, and scrambling for leverage. At a particularly weak moment, using information Avon had casually gleaned during the failed Chesku coup about how vulnerable the government’s palatial headquarters were to attack and how feeble the Terran infrastructure was these days (even its own top security personnel were willing to switch sides at the sign of any personal advantage, or simply in a bid for stability), Blake’s coalition took, and, more importantly, _held_ Earth.

For five months, living back on Earth was like living in a war zone. Blake’s coterie operated under the highest security status. There were attempted assassinations—hell, there were flat-out attempted air strikes. The rebels-cum-new regime had to work up a plan to reorganize the government while effectively under siege. At one point Avon rescued his new banking system code from a literal fire, determined not to lose weeks of work to a paltry hand grenade thrown by some spotty, embarrassed-looking Delta teenager. Vila later discovered this imprisoned teenager was some cousin of a cousin who’d only been drafted and didn’t mean any harm: Vila was always discovering that sort of thing. Or lying to smooth things over: they could never really tell. Still, Blake sent the boy home to his mother after things settled down with no charges, legal or explosive. And quite glad to be out of his ill-fitting Trooper uniform he was, too.

For five months after _that_ , living back on Earth was like existing in a distended Exam Season. Peace had more or less been established, but everything was in shambles. The new press, which had grown up like weeds during the months of conflict, seemingly wanted to speak to everyone, constantly. Everyone was perpetually too busy _to_ speak to them, because the trains didn’t work, and food distribution worked all right, but there were _massive_ queues, and de-mobbing all the Federation troops who signed the Pax Provisional was a bloody nightmare. Everything needed to be done, and perfectly, and all of it needed to be done ages ago. At the end of it, when the lot of them sat blinking and panting on top of a state far better-organized in almost all respects than the one they’d grown up in, with real prospects for the first free intellectual life Earth had seen in centuries, and, at last, something like equitable resource distribution, it was in many ways difficult to believe it was _real_.

Then they began to breathe again. The work continued, and continued to be difficult, but they became the sort of government that gave ambassadorial functions and the like in what had once been Servalan’s plush palace. And at these functions, Avon—never inappropriately, and always discreetly—flirted with people. Visiting men, women, and othergendered beings who, apparently, caught his attention: he selected his targets like a man idly plucking chocolates out of a box. It never went anywhere: Avon never let it. But he did _do_ it, casting glances at the newly-anointed President as he did so. As though he expected some sort of reaction. Avon wasn’t exactly keeping his status as the President’s lover quiet, either, though he was cool and undemonstrative about the arrangement.

Blake refused to let it get under his skin. He didn’t think Avon meant much by it, and if Avon wanted to leave him (or even just wanted to fuck other people), Blake somehow didn’t think this would be the way he went about announcing his intentions. True, Avon wasn’t very romantic. He just responded Blake’s declarations of feeling with a variety of smug, satisfied expressions. But he _was_ eminently sensible. If feeling wouldn’t keep him from doing that to Blake in this manner, practicality would. And Blake would take what he could get. You couldn’t ask someone to change their nature for you, and he’d known that Avon could be private, contained and unemotional when he’d fallen for him. Though even ‘unemotional’ seemed wrong: he knew Avon reacted strongly to him, that even the idea of him could provoke Avon like nothing else. Still, the fact that Avon seemingly felt more regarding Blake than he did about other circumstances and people didn’t necessarily align with Avon’s having a particularly sentimental regard for him, and Blake supposed he didn’t need it to. He liked Avon as he was, and regretting that Avon wasn’t invested in him in exactly the way he was invested in Avon was not only a waste of time, it was also an insult to the man who’d spent the last years working at his side—who showed Blake care and commitment in other, valuable ways, ways Blake truly appreciated. So if Avon wanted to glide around receptions being indecently handsome and charming at people, well, that was his business.

Even if it really annoyed Blake. Even if it made him glower so possessively (Avon just smiled at him from across the room, as though he were paying attention to Blake rather than the conversation he was engaged in—as though he were _encouraged_ ) that Vila took both notice and pity. He offered Blake a drink, and Blake took it from him with a rueful smile.

“Why do you think he does that?” he asked Vila, tilting his glass in Avon’s direction.

“Couldn’t say,” Vila shook his head. “’s rude, though, that’s for sure. I mean, you don’t do it to him.”

“No, I do not,” Blake said solidly, clinking his glass with Vila’s.

“Maybe you ought to,” Vila offered, settling himself next to Blake, leaning against the same ledge and thinking about it. “Y’know, give him a taste of his own medicine.”

Blake frowned as though the notion were distasteful. “I’m not going to set out to hurt him like that.” It would not only be cruel—something Blake didn’t want to do to any partner in any circumstance—it would also offend Avon’s sense of dignity, which Blake knew to be both brittle and important to Avon. “I suppose he might have some deep-seated reason for doing it. And if he does, it’s probably best not to call him on it.”

Vila snorted. “You know in some ways, you handle him with kid gloves. _You_ don’t want to hurt _him_ because you think he might be making an arse of himself because he’s _sad_.”

“I’m not going to attack my partner’s weak spots,” Blake snapped, sounding weary and annoyed. “I’ve tried never to—though he’d tell you quite a different story, I know,” Blake added, heading off the inevitable rejoinder.

“Too nice,” Vila concluded. “Well, so _you_ can’t do it,” Vila said, a hint of speculation in his voice.

“ _No_ ,” Blake said firmly, right before he was taken off by the Lindorian delegation, headed up by Tyce Sarkoff.

She wanted to discuss something Vila thought was boring, and so he only half noted it in the back of his mind for potential future use. Vila watched, however, the way that Avon, who always paid attention to where Blake was in the room, observed Blake’s abduction with narrowed eyes. He excused himself to his conversational partner immediately, the baiting, inviting expression he’d assumed sliding right off his face. He then slipped in behind Blake, looping his arm through the President’s and calmly joining the conversation. Blake laughed at something Tyce said, and Avon leaned against him quite deliberately. The gesture was unusually demonstrative for him. On Avon, a move that ought to have been casual looked pointed, almost clingy.

“Doesn’t mean no one can,” Vila murmured to himself. Vila owed Blake a few favours and Avon a few comeuppances, here and there. “What you need, Blake, seeing as you’re too nice, is a mean friend to act your part. And since Avon’s busy...”

Vila knocked his drink back, headed for the buffet and started planning.

***

It was a good little piece of work, if Vila did say so himself. He’d neatly mocked up some affair with a secretary who Avon hadn’t met at the China HQ, where Blake went regularly (it was one of the few routine trips on which Avon didn’t often accompany him). She was entirely fake, of course. Vila had further amused himself by selecting the most horrible possible name for the woman supposedly cuckolding Avon. With a decent effort, Vila came over chagrined and concerned—he’d heard some fishy-sounding stuff through yet-another-cousin who worked at that office and put two and two together. Thought he should tell Avon, as a mate.

From one perspective, the thing was watertight: corroborating details like anything. Avon’s eyes flickered as he processed the information, aligning it with his own memory of Blake’s absences. Avon had at times a cozy-murder-mystery sort of brain. Give him a train time-table and a diary and he was off. The more technical it was, the more fiddly little bits fit together, the better Avon liken an idea. He could work himself into believing something because it looked good on paper. Vila had seen him do it before: hell, Vila figured that this sort of thinking had been behind some of Avon’s less glittering plans.  

Now, Vila wasn’t heartless. If Avon had looked upset—really, properly upset—Vila would have given the game up right there. But Avon didn’t panic. He didn’t even look sad. His expression was locked tight. A dark glitter in his eyes suggested anger, but then that, too, flitted away. In fact the overall effect frankly creeped Vila out. Surely even Avon would have a paddy if he thought he’d been cheated on? No one was _that_ repressed. (Not even _Avon._ )

“Er, Avon,” Vila said, suddenly worried, “Avon, old pal, you’re not going to do Blake a violence or anything, are you? I mean, you know how it is—men wander, happens to the best of us.” Vila didn’t know of a marriage, not even a really good one, where there hadn’t been rows over that.

“Hurt Blake?” Avon said softly, his jaw spasming in what might, in other circumstances, have been called a smile. “No. Of course I’m not going to do a thing like that. I am simply,” (there was that weird facial tick again) “going to speak to him. We will handle this privately. There is no need to involve anyone else.”

“And you’re not going to try and chuck him?” Vila asked.

Avon laughed dryly. “He should be so lucky.”

“Well,” Vila said awkwardly, thinking that this prank wasn’t playing out at all like he’d imagined, “guess I’d better go, then.”

“Yes,” Avon said in that same weird tone, “I guess you better had. Thank you, Vila, for the—interesting information.”

Vila whistled on his way out of the building, trying to put himself in a better humour. He felt almost a little resentful at the poor reception. It was a _great_ joke, top shelf stuff—and come to think of it, he was sure Avon would make good on it, sooner or later. Maybe the proof of the pudding would come when Avon gave Blake a piece of his mind. All right, so Blake could tell Vila all about how amusingly hysterical Avon had been later (and how sheepish, when Blake inevitably rounded on him with a reminded of his own behaviour). Besides, Vila believed Avon when he said he wasn’t planning on hurting Blake: Avon wouldn’t have lied about it, for a start, and ultimately, he knew Avon really did like Blake (due, in part, to how Avon had dragged Vila into an aggressive, months-long search and rescue operation on the man’s behalf). _That_ was what made all the carrying on so confusing and irritating.

Once more confident that he’d done the right thing, Vila headed home feeling benevolent and hilarious.

***

Alone in his and Blake’s carefully furnished living room, Avon stood silently, contemplating nothing in particular. Idly, he reached a hand up to an ornament on the mantelpiece. Like a cat, he stroked the thing with limp fingers. Batted at it. Almost carefully, he pushed, inching the little porcelain nothing—some ambassadorial gift or other—closer to the lip of the shelf.

Then, with a startling suddenness, the little object tipped, fell, and smashed on the marble slab that lay before the old-fashioned fireplace Blake had been so delighted to find here. Avon blinked down at the thousand glittering shards of something that had once been quite lovely and very expensive. A small blue-green cat he’d rather liked, and had thus allowed to be displayed in their home rather than relegated to the state rooms with the less tasteful diplomatic offerings.

Without looking up, Avon brushed another object off. That too splintered into dust. With a sudden, violent motion, Avon swept the whole row of objects to the ground. Avon rounded on the room, breathing hard, his colour high.

All of it. He thought he would start with—all of it.

***

“Sir,” the aide whispered into the phone, “your partner—well, I don’t know how to say this, but frankly, he’s lost it.”

“What’s Avon done now?” Blake asked, his voice richly amused. He ducked out of the almost-finished meeting, mouthing ‘urgent call’. The others could handle the tail end of this. Blake smiled fondly, placing bets on whether:

  1. Avon had decided to overhaul the palace kitchens, as he’d been threatening to, and had moved in with Wagnerian pomp and thunder;
  2. Avon had had a brilliant technical idea and demanded everything be _immediately_ reorganized around it, with no regard for either the constraints of human limitations or those of physics; or
  3. Avon’s quotidian perfectionism-cum-unreasonableness had simply driven this poor unlucky bastard around the bend.



Blake frowned when he heard what sounded like breaking glass in the background of the call. What exactly was going on in there?

“Security footage,” the aide whispered, cutting the connection (and, presumably, fleeing the building).

As the aide had been duly informed when they’d hooked up the system, Blake _did_ have remote access to the palace’s security monitor network. That had been Avon’s idea of a Christmas present. Useful, but not particularly romantic. With a raised eyebrow, Blake activated the link and asked the network’s interface to locate Avon.

And there Avon stood, in their bedroom. He looked calm—quite handsome, actually. More than usually pale. Wearing a black jumper Blake particularly liked, and grey slacks.

Then, still wearing that calm, fixed, expression, Avon savagely backhanded the bedroom mirror with a sort of mallet Blake hadn’t noticed he was holding. Watching the violent movement, Blake flinched on instinct. The mallet seemed heavy for Avon—seemed almost to drag him around with the weight of his swing. His whole body contorted with it, and the mirror’s wood frame cracked along with the glass. Avon heaved with effort, and Blake saw a thin trickle of perspiration gleaming on Avon’s forehead. Avon’s mouth twisted into a snarl (he was still looking very attractive, Blake noted, with some detached and itself-crazed portion of his brain—in fact at the moment he was somehow devastatingly, _especially_ attractive). Then Avon twirled the mallet and went for the security monitors. With the image-capture lens for the room broken, the picture fizzled out.

Avon hadn’t looked mind-controlled. His eyes had been sharp, his expressions responsive and nuanced rather than flat—and recognizably his own. Blake could identify what Federation psychological tampering looked like from the outside well enough, and had experience with a great many other forms of trance, drug-haze and possession besides. No, Blake bet money this was some sort of natural disturbance.

Avon, clever and subtle, was dangerous at the best of times. That had been an invaluable asset to Blake throughout the liberation campaign. But Blake didn’t know that he’d ever seen Avon this angry. (He didn’t know that he’d ever seen _anyone_ quite this angry, to be honest.) He hadn’t thought cool, civilized Avon, who largely seemed to have calmed down since their reunion, despite all the attendant stresses of the last year, had that kind of thing _in_ him. Under normal circumstances Blake didn’t think Avon would hurt him, but clearly these weren’t normal circumstances. Only an idiot would walk in there without knowing what the hell was going on: Avon might bash him over the head with that mallet-thing and come to his senses and be sorry for it after the damage was done.

Besides, Blake smelled a rat. Some faint recollection, something to do with last week’s reception, was tugging him towards Vila Restal. So was his point-to-point teleport, when he used it. Vila jumped when Blake appeared in his kitchen, but Vila didn’t look _surprised_ to see him there. No, not _surprised_ so much as _shifty_.

Blake started right in. “Avon’s apparently decided to do some rather dramatic spontaneous redecorating. You went over today to drop off the security reports, didn’t you? Was he all right then?”

“Er, yer, he was,” Vila said, trying and failing to look innocent.

Blake’s eyes narrowed. “Vila, while you were at the Palace, did you happen to say anything to him? Have you got any idea what might have brought this on?”

Vila fidgeted, then laughed, awkwardly. “It’s a funny story, Blake,” he started.

“Is it _really?_ ” Blake asked, darkly.

“Look, I only told him you were having it off with a secretary at China HQ. I didn’t steal your handkerchief and plant it or anything—a child could have seen through it. So will he, if he thinks about it.”

“ _Vila_ ,” Blake fixed the man with a hard glare, “you’re going to send whatever faux-evidence you used to convince him through to my datapad _right_ now. And you’re going to be apologizing for this one for a _while_.”

“It was just a joke!” Vila protested. “I did it to help you out, what with all his carrying on at events. It was a harmless little lie!”

Blake thought back to the conversation he’d had with Avon after last week’s ambassadorial function: the event that had, it seemed, been at the root of today’s catastrophe. Avon had been unfailingly polite in public all evening, but very cold to Blake after the crowds had dispersed. He’d made some particularly cutting remarks about there having been no need for Blake to throw himself pathetically at Tyce Sarkoff, blonde, pretty, and far too young for him though she was. Blake had thought Avon was one to talk, but had brushed it off and gone to bed annoyed with his partner—or tried to. Avon had apparently thought that right then, in the wake of their argument about Blake just doing his damn job, was the perfect time for sex. He had gotten even, well, _bitchier_ when Blake hadn’t felt up to being thoroughly taken just then. Avon had only been mollified by having been allowed to do it first thing in the morning.

In retrospect, Blake thought this small domestic squabble took on a rather different complexion.

“When I last saw him he seemed really cool-headed about the whole thing,” Vila insisted. “You know, _annoyed_ about it, but not intensely.”

“Vila,” Blake said slowly, “do me a favor. Tell me, how do you think Avon feels about me? Not,” he hastened to add, “as a partner, per se.” He certainly didn’t want or need to hear Vila’s suppositions about their sex life, right now or ever. “Just in general, how would you describe the intensity of his reactions? To me, specifically?”

Vila looked confused. Then Vila looked thoughtful, his features scrunching up with it. Then the color drained from Vila’s face.

“...this was a _really_ bad idea, wasn’t it?”

“Do you think?” Blake asked with brittle faux-pleasantness.

***

Blake gave Avon time to tire himself out, valuing his life over the furniture. Walking into the portion of the palace they properly lived in was like entering the scene of a natural disaster. The floor was covered in feathers and fluff from what Blake assumed had once been their pillows, duvet and sofa cushions. Blake found the shells of a few of these, despoiled of their innards. They looked as though Avon had bitten through them, knifed through them, or possibly a crazed combination of both.

Blake found Avon kneeling in the center of a spiral of utter destruction: the eye of the storm. In the one clean spot on a floor heaped with glass fragments, Avon sat panting, his chest heaving.

Blake summoned his courage and opened his mouth, but Avon seemed to have identified him by step, heartbeat or scent. He whipped his head around to look at Blake, and his eyes were blown wide, black with emotion.

Blake held up his hands non-threateningly.

“Avon,” he tried, but Avon was having _none_ of it.

With more energy than Blake had thought Avon could _possibly_ still have in him after all this, Avon lunged. He grabbed Blake by the lapels, dragging him down into the mess of shards. He pulled Blake into his undespoiled patch like a predator bringing prey back to its den.

Despite the at times intense antagonism between them, Blake and Avon had never physically fought. They’d never even had particularly violent _sex_ , Avon preferring to take with thorough competence and to be taken with an air of permissive indulgence. But now Avon was mindlessly clawing at Blake with his nails, even as he made a baffling array of accusations. It was all Blake could do to fend off Avon’s hands. He took some marks to his forearms and back, even through his shirt.

“I should _kill you_ for this,” Avon hissed. “Oh you _know_ I won’t, I never could, but _I should_. Did you for a _moment_ imagine that I wouldn’t find out? That I didn’t watch you, that I wouldn’t _mind_ —”

“ _Avon_ ,” Blake tried, managing to pin his lover under him—but Avon only struggled, writhed and bucked, seeming animal and half-mad.

Avon refused to listen, even for a second. “I suppose you’re planning on leaving me again, are you? Oh well I have a _surprise_ for you, _Blake_ , if you think _that_ is going to work a second time—”

“A _second_ time?” Blake asked, baffled. Avon was totally unmollified. In fact he seemed further incensed by Blake’s confusion, which he appeared to interpret as a poor excuse.

“Don’t leave me,” Avon begged and snarled at once, “don’t you _dare_ , I’ll _kill_ you, I’ll—” Avon’s breath slipped and his savage, hysterical tone mutated into something like a sob. “You utter _bastard_. Fuck me, I, fuck _me_.” Avon gulped his words. He was fumbling at Blake’s clothing even as he’d begun to cry, ragged and ugly and _furious_ : tears streaming over hard, red cheeks, coursing from glinting, rage-filled eyes.

“ _What?_ ” Blake asked. “Sweetheart—” Avon made a high, wretched, exceptionally angry sound at that, like a thing being mortally wounded, and tugged harder at Blake’s clothes, “sweetheart the room’s _covered_ in glass—”

“I don’t care,” Avon snarled, “I don’t care, I _don’t_ , how many times?” He stripped his own shirt and kissed Blake fiercely, then drew slightly back, dipping his head and whispering into Blake’s neck. “How many times did you _fuck_ her, was it _just_ her, was it just _sex?_ I can’t bear it, I _can’t_ , I don’t want to know, but tell me, you _have to_ tell me, Blake. You said you loved me, you _said_.”

“I do,” Blake said, catching the hand that went came up to scratch his face in response to what Avon perceived as a lie. “Avon, damn it, _I do_.”

It was becoming fairly clear to Blake that explanations would not answer at present. To calm Avon down, he’d need, in his lover’s terms, to hack into the system through a back-door. Fortunately, he knew Avon better than anyone, despite what all of this implied about certain misapprehensions on his part.

So: Avon was hysterical and hyperventilating, and seemed to _need_ Blake to fuck him. Said as much. Blake—was not entirely unprepared for this eventuality. Avon often wanted sex when he was annoyed or otherwise upset. Blake had thought it was a physiological sort of preference—stress-relief, for the kind of man who didn’t exactly go in for hugs and hadn’t lasted for longer than a session of Cally’s yoga. But perhaps sex offered Avon grounding and comfort when he needed it. Perhaps Avon wanted sex when he was unhappy for—rather more romantic reasons than Blake had supposed.

Blake pulled out a small bottle of lubricant from his pocket. Avon, understanding him instantly (and seeming to question Blake’s forethought not at all), spun around and braced himself on his hands and knees. (Blake was grateful that here, in Avon’s little clearing, Avon’s hands wouldn’t get sliced to ribbons by the pose.) Blake tugged his partner’s trousers down just enough to allow for this, wasted little time on preparation, and took himself in hand, relieved (and, with a more rational and long-sighted part of his brain, a bit worried) to discover that Avon’s sobbing, clinging to him and threatening violence while trembling and demanding to be fucked had gone _straight_ to his cock. He was more than ready for what needed to be done.

Avon thrashed and made a keening sound on being entered, pushing back up into Blake impatiently.

“You like that?” Blake murmured into Avon’s neck, and Avon moaned wretchedly as Blake thrust in deeply. Avon’s over-taxed limbs went loose and slack. He slumped onto his elbows, his fingers sliding forward to claw the wax off their ruined floor.

“ _You_ don’t,” Avon murmured, almost to himself, “or you wouldn’t have—”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Blake snarled, fucking Avon hard enough that Avon made an unguarded little squeak. “You’re mine, do you hear me? I only want you. I’ve only _been_ with you,” Blake insisted, hoping the combination of words and movement could cut through Avon’s writhing, jumbled thought-processes and ground him thoroughly enough to let any of this get through.

Avon shook his head quite feebly, _no_ , and Blake pulled Avon’s hair hard (even as he anchored Avon’s hip with his other hand, pinning Avon on his cock). Avon made a sharp sound of pain and twisted his head. Blake could see Avon’s pale throat working and, moved by a sudden impulse, lunged and dug his teeth into it, sucking hard even as he bit. Normally Blake held back in bed, curbing that sort of violent, possessive impulse (thinking it very much not Avon’s sort of thing): he didn’t this time. Avon _screamed_ , and Blake felt guilty that it sounded _so_ good to him.

“Say you’re mine,” Blake said, keeping his voice commanding, even as he could hear it going thready with arousal. His bit his lip against a moan at Avon’s answering, feeble, breathy ‘yes, Blake’.

“And if I tell you I don’t want anyone else, that I wouldn’t touch anyone else, then you believe me, don’t you, Avon?” Blake asked, shaking his lover when Avon didn’t answer.

“I do,” Avon forced out, sounding confused, “if you say it, I do, I—”

“And you are _not_ ,” Blake whispered menacingly, putting some heat into it, “going to flirt with all and sundry in pathetic attempts to make me jealous anymore, are you, love? You don’t need to do that, do you? And you know how I _hate_ it.”

“Do you?” Avon asked, sounding, in the midst of all this, happy to hear it, “do you really? I _thought_ you might.”

“I absolutely despise it,” Blake assured him. “I hate the thought of anyone else even looking at you. Only the fact that I _know_ you’d never seriously entertain them, that you’d never do that to me, keeps me from having to fuck you to pieces to remind you whose you are. But I _know_ you never would. Because you love me, don’t you sweetheart?”

Avon’s breath caught and he said nothing. Blake devoted himself seriously to the business of fucking Avon for a few minutes, until Avon was gasping.

“Aren’t you going to touch me?” Avon asked, almost plaintive. Experience told Blake that Avon couldn’t come without Blake’s hand on his cock. “I need it, you _know_ I—”

“Not,” Blake said, “until you say it.” Ridiculous, to demand assurances when they were surrounded by proofs. Avon loved him, and Avon valued his fidelity, more than material possessions: more than everything they owned. Even so.

“I love you,” Avon said suddenly, sounding desperate, the words coming out in a slurred rush.

“ _Good_ ,” Blake rumbled, wrapping his hand around his partner’s cock. Avon breathed raggedly, and said it again and again, I love you and I’m yours and incoherent promises to make it so good Blake wouldn’t need anyone but him, until he came choking Blake’s name. He moaned as Blake took his time finishing in him, drawing it out on purpose.

“Right,” Blake said after he’d recovered himself somewhat, sitting back and breathing hard. “Now _listen to yourself_. This short-circuited your brain, you weren’t even _thinking_. Would _I_ do that? To _you?_ Oh I know Vila handed you a clever little time-table, but stop calculating and actually _consider it_ for a moment.”

Avon turned over, blinking as if coming out of a doze. He pulled his trousers to rights and shrugged his shirt back on, looking unusually and adorably confused. His hair was a wreck and his lips were bruised from his biting them to (ineffectively) stifle noise while Blake took him. Cheat? Just _looking_ at Avon like this made Blake’s thoroughly used cock twitch with interest (if not with the blood flow to do anything about it).

“When,” Blake asked his lover with colossal patience, “have I had _time_ , Avon? All that nonsense about when I might have been in China aside—how the _hell_ do you think I could get my regular check-ins done over there _and_ carry on with someone? You know how hard we work, you know _everything_ I do. A _sustained affair_ with a random secretary? I wouldn't _hire_ a secretary you didn’t know about, let alone ask her to a romantic dinner somewhere. And I wouldn't have casual sex _without_ asking someone to bloody dinner first, because I’m thirty-eight and boring. While we’re on the subject, I wouldn't have casual sex with _anyone_ — _not_ when I have an attractive partner who demands all my energy in that regard, who _I love_ , and who, by the way, would _definitely_ find out. Avon, if I wanted an open relationship—”

Avon’s eyes glinted dangerously.

“—which I _don't_ ,” Blake hastened to say, “or to leave you, _which I don't_ ,” (my god, that expression was terrifying) (and attractive—Blake wondered what was _wrong_ with him, but not very hard), “why wouldn't I just _say_ that? Why would I risk my political career and your regard like that? You know what your good opinion, under all the minor skirmishes, means to me? Sweetheart, it’s everything. I don’t even want to be a person you don’t trust.”

Blake became aware he was must look a little hang-dog wounded when Avon tentatively scooted closer to him, so that their legs touched.

“I didn’t actually pause to consider—most of that,” Avon said, by way of half-assed apology. “Admittedly, I—thought more about whether you _could_ have done it than whether you would have.”

Blake rolled his eyes, unsurprised. “Were you really going to—” he sketched a gesture at the devastation around them, “what, leave me? Over _this?_ ”

“Oh no,” Avon shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would never allow you to slip away from me again. I was simply going to take you somewhere safe and remote, for a little while. Then, to the extent I had planned anything at all, I thought I might see whether I could covertly dispose of whoever it was who had touched you.” Blake... wanted to believe Avon only meant ‘see her fired’ (though that in and of itself would have been fairly unethical), but he was not at all sure. Perhaps there were things it was best not to question too closely, in a relationship. Such as how Avon had planned to take him ‘somewhere safe and remote’, and whether Avon had a stun gun or a rag soaked in chloroform somewhere on the premises.

“Then,” Avon continued, “I intended to have a long talk with _you_ about our relationship. And, of course, I would have ensured that you had limited contact with anyone I hadn’t vetted for a good few years to come. Though I suppose it doesn't matter now, as the—” Avon’s lip twisted, “—initial infraction never occurred after all.”

Blake... took a moment to digest this. “You know up until now, I, er,” Blake cleared his throat, “wasn't sure you _liked_ me that all that much.”

Avon regarded him blankly.

“But I guess this is—” Blake glanced around; winced, “a _lot_ of property damage’s worth of liking me.”

“I’m insane about you,” Avon said as though he was telling Blake the time of day. “And we got together—rather quietly, in the end.” ( _Had_ they? The day they’d reunited, they’d killed the ex-President, laid waste to a major center of the slave trade, and Avon had ruined a chunk of his spaceship in a way Blake had never been able to satisfactorily explain to his staff. What the hell did _Avon_ think of as a suitably dramatic consummation?) “I suppose the bottled up tension was going to come out somehow or other. Frankly, we are probably lucky no one is dead.”

A plant took this opportunity to fall off the ledge where it was precariously balanced, because Avon had almost shoved it off before getting distracted by some other act of wanton destruction. Its vase shattered pointedly.

“Excepting that fern,” Avon allowed.

“Well,” Blake exhaled. “I'm disappointed that you didn't have faith in me, and that we have to move out while a disaster clean-up crew takes care of all this. On the other hand, I’ll admit it _was_ a very convincing prank, if in remarkably poor taste. And I suppose it gave us a chance to talk this all out. And it shows, as you say, that you do really care about me.” In a frankly mad way, but even so: Blake would take what he could get. If he’d appreciated Avon’s toleration of their relationship, he could certainly be keen on Avon’s desperate enthusiasm for their relationship. Blake looked around him with a raised eyebrow. “I’m sure this will all be very, very funny. In about fifteen years.”

Something in this train of thought seemed to have a special significance for Avon. His head jerked up, like a hound scenting blood. His nostrils even flared. He looked into the distance, a feverish glow lighting in his eyes, which were rendered darker and more dramatic even than usual by their raccoon-like rings of smeared-eyeliner.

“ _Vila_ ,” Avon hissed, realizing the true identity of his betrayer.

Blake shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, he lied, but it _was_ just a joke, Avon. Besides, it _doesn’t matter._ You know it never happened. _You_ trust _me_ , don’t you?”

“Oh, I do trust you,” Avon breathed, “but if you’ve any evidence you weren’t—where he said you were, when he said, doing what he said, I should still like to—look at it. For my own comfort. Blake, can I kill Vila?” Avon didn’t look like he was joking, exactly.

Blake rolled his eyes and chose not to respond. He adored Avon, and was committed to spending the remainder of his life wrangling one of the most over-the-top people he’d ever met, but he did know what he’d let himself in for. He had done even before he’d realized _he himself_ was one of Avon’s hot-button topics.

“Now that every piece of furniture we own is broken, have you gotten this thoroughly out of your system?”

Avon glanced carelessly around him at the rubble: shards of wood and glass and ceramics. “Yes, I think so.” Blake wondered whether Avon would be intensely embarrassed about all this later and decided: probably.

“And is there anything I can do to, I don’t know, soothe or accommodate you, so that we can ensure you never feel a need to do this again?” Blake asked, making an effort at careful negotiation. The Presidential salary was actually rather modest: they couldn’t afford to cope with regular displays of Avon’s affection.

Avon looked as though there was something, yes, but he wasn’t going to be the one to say it.

Blake took a guess. “Would it help,” and by ‘help’, he meant ‘prevent you from:

  1. locking yourself in the bathroom,
  2. trying (and failing) to break the reinforced plasticine mirror in there, and
  3. shredding my dressing gown with nail scissors, all because I had to talk to the Lindor delegation into the late hours’,



“if we, say, got married?"

"Commitment ceremonies are inherently ridiculous and unnecessary,” Avon responded automatically, as if cued. “Ours should have a very large chocolate fountain. They're not gauche if you do it right. Everyone loves chocolate, Blake." Bless him, Avon didn’t even _blink_.

"But I only love you,” Blake said, clasping his bedraggled, probably-insane fiancé to his bosom.

“Good,” Avon murmured into his shoulder. “That—makes things easier.”

 


End file.
